EMA research shows that the true cost of inefficient Test Environment Management for the average enterprise in the survey is 1.4 million dollars per year.
Many organisations lack visibility and control over their Test Environments. This leads to:
In this post, we are going to unpack the 5 best practices for Test Management to ensure you’re not losing your competitive edge.
How much money can you save using an effective test management environment? We estimate that you can save over $128,000 per year for an organisation using an average of 188 environments.
The client expectation challenge
Every client wants the highest quality product at the cheapest price within the shortest time frame. This is stressful for development teams who are trying to handle expectations while managing scope creep. Trying to deliver a quality product within short timeframes forces the development team to cut corners, especially during testing. If you skip testing, you are going to increase the cost and time to deliver and potentially sacrifice the quality.
Instead, use the below practices to create an effective and high-performing test management environment.
The 5 best practices in Testing:
1. Test early, iteratively and often
This advice seems like common sense, but common sense is not always common action. As shown in the image below finding bugs later in the process requires more effort and cost. Early tests ensure a higher quality product in a shorter space of time.
Best practice tip: create test cases as soon as the initial software requirements have been formulated and then iteratively test throughout the development process.
2. Reuse, measure and improve
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time. It’s great to reuse any test procedures or cases that worked in the past. A senior test specialist said, “You can only improve what you can measure.” Make sure that you are measuring everything you do to see what works (and must be kept) and what isn’t (and must be scrapped).
Best practice tip: reuse any fast, reliable and well-structured testing process and continual improve it.
3. Flexibility is key
Testing is a dynamic field and it requires a “different strokes for different folks” approach. For instance, testing a security, mobile or big data analytics product will have very different requirements. You need to be flexible in your approach and adapt your testing framework that suits the product at hand.
Best practice tip: follow a requirements-based testing approach. This enables you to be flexible, complete early system validation and calculate the testing efforts needed.
4. Communication saves lives
Ok, that statement is a bit extreme, but we got your attention. That’s the key to effective communication in an era of information overload. We need communication that is succinct, relevant and ENGAGING.
We live in a location-independent world, where the effective coordination of co-located resources can be your competitive advantage. With all the meetings, distractions and emotionally loaded social media content, what’s going to make your message stand out?
Best practice tip: test management requires sharing all relevant data such as goals, statuses, issues... in the right format, at the right time, to the right person.
5. Leverage the right tool
You might look at the above points and think, "it makes sense, but it’ll take too long to put this process in place." Instead you should leverage tools built specifically for this reason.
Apwide is a leader in the test management arena. Our Test Environment Management (TEM) product is a combination of best practices and tools that gives more control on pre-production environments.
Connecting Apwide to your Test Management tool, is when you’re going to get the most powerful benefits. For instance, connecting Xray Test Management for Jira with Apwide will allow you to:
Conclusion
Testing is a messy job, but to make things a little easier:
Thanks for reading this article with us at Apwide, where our passion is to create an environment where you flourish.
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